About Us

Crest of Hope: Patamon's World - bringing Digimon info to you from an Animaniac
(=Anime maniac) in Australia!

What we try to do

I wanted to make PW the most comprehensive resource it could be, with all
the info you'd find on any Digimon site, but I also wanted to make it different
and original. That's why we have pages named after different Digidestined and
strange names for the information sections. It's also why I've added things
like theories, humour, random Javascript games and classifieds. I guess the
mainstay of all this unusual information is the opinion articles and columns
that have been written by me and other staff over the years. There was a time
when all I wanted to do was to make it to first place on topsites, but that's
died down since then and my main aim now is to get as much stuff as I can onto
this site. I looked at my stats compared to some others, and realised that
while I wasn't getting as many unique hits I was getting a lot more total pageviews.
That suggested repeat visitors, and that's what I want now - people who love
the site and will come back for more.

Crest of Hope: A History

It all started back in February 2001. I was 11 and a half years old, just
starting Year 9 at school, and I already knew more about computers than my
IT teacher. We'd just upgraded our computer to a 733 MHz Celeron, with Win98
SE and Office 2000 Premium. Now, if you know about the different releases of
Office, you'll know that Office 2K Premium includes FrontPage 2000, and I got
to know the program straight away.

Cut to early 2002. By then, Digimon had been screening on free-to-air TV for
a year or two, but I'd never really watched it. I've always been an all-out
Pokémaniac and I thought Digimon was just some cheap rip-off of Pokémon. Boy,
was I wrong! I watched a bit of Digimon while waiting for another show to come
on, and I was hooked! I watched it every week for months, and then I had an
idea. What better way to communicate my new knowledge to the world, than to
make a website?

That idea became Crest of Hope: Patamon's World. I set up an account with
Netfirms and first published, using basically all placeholders, in June 2002.
I left it there, as I had exams to worry about and heaps of schoolwork to do.
I had absolutely no hits. At the end of November 2002, I came back to the site,
and formally opened it on December 1, 2002. I worked really hard for about
a month and got as much content up as I could. Of course, it's not finished
yet.
It'll
never
be
finished
-
there's
always more to add.

Since then, affiliates have come and gone, and a lot of people have joined
the site as news updaters, article writers and forum mods. These days, I'm
getting
a couple of thousand hits a day, which puts me comfortably in the small-to-midsize
Digimon site bracket.

A new chapter in PW's history started in late April 2004. When I reopened
the Pokémon Peninsula, one of the things that people commented on at the Pokémon
Community was the intrusive ads on Netfirms. After I explained that I couldn't
pay for hosting, a member there, JKaizer (Greggy), offered to host both TPP and PW
on his own personal hosting account! Thanks Greggyboo, I promise I'll repay
you someday.

In November 2004, I graduated from high school; for some time before that,
I'd been discussing a domain name with Shawn. That ended up not going through,
but Greggy decided to give me a "graduating-way-before-your-time" present
in the form of the domain ryux.net. With the domain name in hand, Shawn agreed
to host me, so, well, now we have a heap of space and a heap of bandwidth.
Which is pretty nice, you have to admit. ^^ We also had a lot of downtime,
which *wasn't* so nice. Also around the end of November/beginning of December,
there were a couple of newspaper articles about me mentioning PW, and this
approximately quintupled (that's x5!) hits in just one day. o_O Which is really nice,
you have to admit. It actually pushed PW to the highest it's ever been on the
Digimon Super Top 100 and Big 50 Topsites...

PW had about a month of downtime through January 2005, but came back up and
slowly tried to recover. Plus, February 20 2005 gave us something new... actually,
technically Greggy gave us something new, but it was ON that date. Whatever
XD. In any case, yeah, Greggy bought the forum its own domain... ^^

And then... yeah, Shawn struck again. More downtime, with no warning and no
idea of when the server would come back up. So we waved goodbye to Shawn, and
went back to Greggy. XD That was early June 2005. And so we go on and on and
on and on and on and on and on.... on and on and on and on and on and on and
on and on and on and on and *whacks self* Sorry, that was GC :P

Although I didn't make any content updates between April and November 2005
(that's over half a year without - eek, let me go put my lunch in the microwave
- k, I'm back - a real update!), I had been spending time converting the main
part of the site (that means everything but the Digidex) to PHP. This involved
recoding every single page, due to Frontpage's fugly coding. Somewhere during
those months, my hard disk died with PW on it, and I lost several weeks while
we ordered a new computer, configured it (I installed three operating systems
-_-) and very slowly retrieved data from the dead disk, managed only with the
help of HiKaizer's dad. I finally finished the recode just before my final
first-year exams, and the
major update
went
up on November
2, 2005 - with its own domain! Greggy and I had paid for a web hosting upgrade
using the money I got from my sister for my birthday, and our host, Elixant,
had a special on at that time which involved a free domain for the lifetime
of the account, so we switched ryux.net to the lifetime one and I convinced
Greggy to register digivice.net to replace it. ^_____________^ Also, a couple
of weeks before this, we registered our 2 millionth pageview, which isn't too
bad for a small site.

And now... it seems I'm updating again. XD

It's never nice to say goodbye to a friend, but many of the sites I once affiliated
with closed down or stopped updating. Special thanks goes to Tim Casey, who's
the webmaster of the Anime Edition. His Digimon section has now closed, but
it was my first affiliate and the site that first promoted my website on the
Net.